Apartheid. USA 1988

June 13, 1987:

Five students were beaten with baseball bats and 13 youths were arrested as a roving band of beer-drinking toughs snatched gold chains and attacked victims at random outside South Shore High School in the Flatblands section of Brooklyn. All those arrested were black and all but one of the victims were white. The violence was touched off by a fight between one black and one white youth. Immediately groups of blacks and whites ran to nearby parked cars and returned with bats and sticks. School security guards broke up the fight, then retreated amid a shower of beer bottles hurled by student bystanders. However, the groups of whites and blacks drifted apart and no general racial melee ensued. But four white students and one black student were attacked by some blacks in a series of incidents that swirled from a parking lot to lawns and surrounding streets. As the police arrived, the chase led to the Glenwood Houses, a city project just north of the school. There, 13 youths, some of the South Shore students, were seized, along with a razor and a knife. While the police called it a racial incident, Rina Stempel, the principal of South Shore High, said there had been no racial problems at the school for five years. The

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student body is composed of 3 300 students, 52 percent are whites, 37 percent are blacks, 7 percent are Hispanics and 3 percent are Asians.^113.

113. The New York Times, from a report by Robert D McFadden